


Just You, Me, and Some Cigarettes

by thebestoftimes



Category: Looking for Alaska - John Green, The Fault in Our Stars - John Green
Genre: Afterlife, Angst, Crossover, F/M, cigarette metaphors galore, gus misses hazel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-09
Updated: 2014-06-09
Packaged: 2018-02-04 01:43:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1762117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thebestoftimes/pseuds/thebestoftimes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His life ended in the middle of a sentence, but he isn't finished writing it yet.</p><p>No one knew her last words, but that doesn't mean she has nothing left to say.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Just You, Me, and Some Cigarettes

“Lonely up here, isn’t it?” The voice cut through the fog, shaking Augustus.

He turned shakily to see a figure emerge from the mist. Curvy and petite, the girl had long, auburn hair that appeared windswept even in the still air. Her green eyes were the brightest part of her, a splash of color on skin and hair that were probably vibrant during her time alive but had since then faded so that she could have been painted before him in watercolor. Fog clung to her, blending with the weak tendrils of smoke that spiraled half heartedly from the cigarette she balanced between two fingers, inches from her parted lips.

“Yeah,” he said, looking her over quizzically. Augustus couldn’t find anything familiar about her. “Do I know you?”

“No. But I know you.” She smirked, her mouth pulling up in a way he vaguely recognized-that was what he did, sometimes, when he said something he found clever.

“Would you mind telling me how?” He took an even step toward her, having both his legs back now. She took a long drag from her cigarette before meeting his eyes again.

“I’ve been looking for you. Just to talk, you know. I thought...well, I think we have a lot in common, actually.” The smoke her cigarette emitted suddenly thinned to nothing. “Damnit,” she cursed, frantically pulling a new one from her tight jeans pocket and desperately trying to light it off the sputtering light. The girl must have been a dedicated smoker in her life, because she got the end of the new cigarette to glow despite the overall dampness of the place. “Can’t a girl just get an easy smoke around here?”

Gus wasn’t sure whether she was addressing him or not, so he decided to move the conversation along. “Are you going to tell me who are you are?”

“My name’s Alaska. You’re Augustus. And boy, have you been needing me.”

“I’ve been needing you?”

She laughed, loudly and melodically. The sound echoed around them, though Augustus couldn’t see anything for it to echo off of. He liked how it did that, though. Everything came from nothing.

“You’re always skulking around over here, and I thought, well, ‘He must be looking for something.’”

That was partly true, actually, though he didn’t know specifically what he was looking for. He’d find it when he found it. Gus nodded slowly in slight agreement.

Her wide grin filled her face again.“What you’ve been looking for is me.”

“Actually, um, I was looking for a way to...check in on my family and stuff...I don’t know if that exists, but-”

“Exactly. There are things like that, little windows to Earth. I can show you where they are, if you want.”

He felt a shock resonate through his chest. Hazel Grace. “Yeah,” he agreed. “Show me.” If she was telling the truth, maybe he could see Hazel’s face again. His memories of it were slipping from him, floating off into the folds of mist and leaving him with only a faint impression of what she’d looked like, sounded like.

The two of them set off into the mist. Its pale tongues swallowed them into its depths. Gus couldn’t get over the monotony of what came after-every spot exactly the same with nothing to identify one region from the next. Every moment was precisely like the last, unless you yourself made it different. But it wasn’t like anyone would care if you did. He didn’t like that much. It was as if the  place didn’t want to be noticed.

“It’s funny,” Alaska’s hesitant voice broke the silence. “You’d expect it to be so cold here. The air just feels…”

“Numb,” Augustus offered. She nodded..

A sharp gleam cut their dull grey surroundings. “Found it!” Alaska hollered, running ahead. She reminded Augustus of the heart monitors he’d had to watch in so many hospitals-high one second, dipping low the next. Too often uneven and spasmodic.  One minute Alaska’s solemn body slumped, her voice soft and weary. Then energy flooded through her and sent her off into the distance, daring anyone to keep up with her.

He had the mind of a writer, Augustus decided. Not the skill, but the mind, oh yes.

On matching legs, he sped off after Alaska. They stopped abruptly in a small clearing, the vapor clearing to reveal a mirror stretching from the ground to above their heads. Gus remembered  the Mirror of Erised from Harry Potter with a smile.I show not your face but your heart’s desire.

But when Alaska positioned him in front of the pane, his own face stared back at him. He furrowed his eyebrows in puzzlement.

“You’ve got to really concentrate.” Alaska’s voice sounded from behind him. “It doesn’t work unless you concentrate.”

“Concentrate on what?”

 “What do you most need to remember?” Her voice took on a dramatic hush. “What would you really like to see?”

The face of Hazel Grace filled his mind: the endearing puff of her cheeks, eyes that seemed to burn right through him. The restraining cannula that embraced her head, the rasp in her voice. The brightness of her laugh.

An image began taking shape in the mirror. A faint impression of her emerged from the mist, as though the mirror were remembering a girl who had once stood before it. It was just enough to make out who it was-the pageboy haircut, and beside her, the oxygen tank. “Hazel,” he breathed.

A scene formed around her. There was a couch. She was in a room. Something else began taking shape beside her-a person, gawky, with a shock of blond hair, his head not quite focused in the same direction as hers. Isaac. Color flooded the pane until it was as though looking through a window.

“Hump the moist cave wall,” came Hazel’s voice, echoing through his mind. Despite the agonizing feeling of longing he felt, a laugh rose from Augustus’s throat. Hazel and Isaac, playing The Price of Dawn together, and saying that. The laugh bubbled out of him, shaking his whole body and shocking his mind at the sound. Happiness. So hard to come by when you’re dead. But here it was, his laugh being absorbed into the fog, which seemed to lighten around him.

“She seems great,” remarked Alaska. Gus found himself nodding, his eyes still fixed on Hazel.

“I dislike living in a world without Augustus Waters.” This time, Isaac's voice carried through the window.

The computerized voice of the video game replied “I do not understand-” but he cut it off.

Augustus turned away from his friends. The connection severed instantly, like turning off a TV screen. “I don’t understand either,” he whispered.

Alaska reached her arm around him. “Hm?”

“I dislike living in a world without Hazel Grace Lancaster. And I dislike living in a world without Isaac.”

“Oh.” She pulled her arm away and turned to look at the mirror. “Say, Augustus, now seems like a damn good time for a cigarette. You want a cigarette?”

He sighed. “Sure.” She pulled a limp smoke from her pocket and handed it to him, before putting another in her mouth and lighting it with a grimy lighter. Smoke curled weakly from the end. She held the lighter out to him. He shook his head, cigarette dangling from his lips.

“You gotta light it.”

“No. I never light them.”

“Then what the hell’s the point?”

“It’s...it’s a metaphor. You put the killing thing between your teeth but you don’t give it the power to do its killing.”

Alaska was silent for a moment. “Well if that isn’t the most pretentious fucking thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”

“You’re not alive,” Gus pointed out.

“You can’t be killed,” she retorted.

“It’s a metaphor, Alaska!”

She scoffed. “A waste of a smoke is what it is. And I need to smoke. Bad habit I picked up.”

“That’s fine, but cancer? It sucks. You saw Hazel.”

Her grin stretched across her face so that she looked like the Chesire Cat, becoming all teeth and lips-teeth and lips and a cigarette. “I smoked to die. And it worked, to some extent.” Augustus decided not press the issue. “It can’t hurt you anymore,” Alaska said, offering him the lighter again. He still shook his head.

“I think I’ll stick this one out. For Hazel. She didn’t mind the metaphor.” Alaska pocketed the lighter, nodding.

They stayed there for  a few minutes, each considering the other in silence. Alaska’s smoke sputtered out, barely halfway done. She reached up, as if to remove it, before catching her hand halfway. It stayed, tucked between her teeth.

Suddenly, she broke the silence. “What were your last words?”

“What?”

“It’s just, I had this...friend...who was obsessed with learning people’s last words. And, I don’t know, I was thinking about that just now. About  metaphors, and stuff. And I remembered watching him ask the cop who found me in my totaled car what my last words were. And the cop didn’t know, and I just wanted to scream at this kid what it was. I wanted him to know.”

“I was half conscious for my last few days. I don’t remember mine,” Augustus said, feeling somewhat disappointed at the thought.

“I remember mine, and that’s why I’m still here. I’m waiting for him.” Gus raised a puzzled eyebrow. “When he dies, he’ll end up here. And then I can tell him. I need to make sure that he knows.”

“You mean you can leave here?”

“I think you can. You can move on. But there’s no going back, and...I have stuff to do here. But you can leave.”

It was tempting. Whatever was beyond, Augustus wanted to know. But he had an eternity to find out. He could wait. “I’m staying too.” She looked up, almost surprised.

“Then it’s just you, me, and some cigarettes,” Alaska said. Augustus nodded. The fog closed in once more.

 

  


**Author's Note:**

> Come say hello on tumblr! doomsdayroses.tumblr.com


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